Jean-François Fayet, Karl Radek (1885-1939): Biographie politique, (Bern: Peter Lang), pp.xv & 813, ISBN 3-906770-31-1, pbk.

Of all those whose lives became enmeshed in the drama and tragedy of bolshevism, Radek must rank as one of the most fascinating. This is not on grounds of any great strength of personality, and in some respects this remains a little elusive even after one has read this meticulous new biography. Rather, Radek fascinates because of the range and complexity of the networks, the connections, the social and political milieux through which his biography takes us. One of the outstanding figures of the early Comintern, Radek personified its internationalism, and this not only in his critiques of war and imperialism and his expectations — admittedly more cautious than many — of the spread of the revolution. More than that, as Fayet stresses, Radek himself was like an archetype of Deutscher’s ‘non-Jewish Jew’, whose ideas, career and identity alike seemed to transcend the limitations of the merely national. Born in Galicia and passing through a romantic Polish nationalist phase before embracing socialism, Radek, like his native Poland, came to stand at the fulcrum of the Soviet-German relationship that held the key to the emerging European post-war order. His tragi-comedy, according to Heinrich Brandler, was to pass in Germany for a Russian, and in Russia for a German. However, as what Fayet calls the ‘great communicator’ of the revolution, this was also his great political asset. Through his German ‘passion’ combined with the Russian enthusiasms of the first workers’ revolution, he emerged first as figurehead, then as scapegoat, and never recaptured his early pre-eminence after the failed German October of 1923. No doubt it was precisely as communicator and internationalist that he fell foul of the new bureaucratic order. At the same time, the tortuous development of Radek’s politics until his arrest in 1937 provides anything but a clean-cut break between the first four congresses of the Comintern and what came after. As always, one of the great advantages of biography is in adding to standard periodisations a more complex layer of narrative, often corroborative but also adding its own complications.

The great strength of Fayet’s biography is precisely this provision of a nuanced and multi-layered narrative that is particularly strong in respect of the cultural and political context and the wider associations through which Radek moved. In his introduction, he tells of how his curiosity about Radek was aroused by reading references to him in E H Carr’s The Bolshevik Revolution and wanting to retrieve him from the footnotes of such accounts. Of course, Fayet is not the first to set himself this goal and he makes proper acknowledgement of the contribution already made by Warren Lerner in his biography of 1969. Nevertheless, given the opening of archives and the development of scholarship based upon them, it is not surprising that there is a good deal more to add, though more perhaps in the detail than in the general outline. In this respect, Fayet’s is a impressive work of scholarship that combines the painstaking use of original sources with careful attention to these historiographical debates.

A particular asset is the much fuller account he now provides of Radek’s background and early years, including his involvement in the pre-1914 German and Polish social-democratic parties. Skilfully Fayet steers his way through a series of political and historioraphical minefields such as the ‘Radek affair’ just before the First World War, the alleged German funding of the bolsheviks prior to 1917, and Radek’s avoidance of the fate of those like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht who were murdered by the German reaction of 1919. (Here Fayet records the allegation that his life was spared in return for details of the whereabouts of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, but argues that, in the absence of any firm evidence of this, Radek’s role and mandate as an interlocutor with the Soviet government offers a more likely explanation.) Similarly with regard to the Stalin period, Fayet offers judicious assessments of episodes like Radek’s awful ‘The architect of socialist society’ (1934), a hagiography of such gross and misplaced superlatives that historians have speculated as to whether it represents a hidden satire on the regime and its absurdities. Regarding Radek’s arrest in the purges, again Fayet presents a range of possible interpetations of Stalin’s motives that have been advanced, before offering his own view that it is unnecessary and perhaps inappropriate to seek such personalised forms of explanation.

There would be little point in multiplying such examples, and for an account of this singularly complex and controversial life Fayet’s will surely prove definitive. I have only one real caveat, and that is regarding the treatment of Radek’s public and private persona. The book is described as a political biography, and Radek’s, as Fayet points out, was a political life, mitigated only by the passions identified here for women, tobacco and literature. Nevertheless, while fully appreciating the opaqueness of the sorts of sources on which such accounts are so often dependent, perhaps there might have been more of a discussion as to why Radek should have aroused such powerful antipathies, even among those who might have been closest to him, such as Luxemburg, and in a movement which contained no shortage of objectionable individuals. Evidence of Radek’s duplicity and double-dealing, or what was perceived as such, is certainly provided. But perhaps there was more scope too for the sort of approach adopted in the current Références/Facettes series (Presses de Sciences PO). In these volumes, figures like Thorez and Mussolini are reconstructed through their diverse depictions and self-depictions, posthumous as well as contemporaneous, and ‘political’ lives thus provided in the double sense of their contested construction as well as their content. Radek would surely be an ideal candidate for such a treatment, and even within Fayet’s more narrative account there might have been ways of doing more to incorporate such a perspective. Nevertheless, given the comprehensiveness of Fayet’s account, it would be quite misleading to end on such a note. It really is an exemplary treatment in the best tradition of the biographies of leading bolsheviks.

Kevin Morgan